Background
Dickie, George Thomas was born on August 12, 1936 in Palmetto, Florida, United States.
Dickie, George Thomas was born on August 12, 1936 in Palmetto, Florida, United States.
Florida State University and the University of California, Los Angeles.
1956 64. Instructor, then Associate Professor of Philosophy. Walsh State University. 1964 5, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Houston.
From 1965, Associate, then
(1967) full Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois. Chicago; 1990, Vice President of the American Society of Aesthetics.
Dickie is a major figure in contemporary analytical aesthetics, whose contributions have stimulated much debate. One of his fundamental contentions is that the notion of a distinct ‘aesthetic realm’ or ‘aesthetic faculty’ such as taste, is ill founded: no philosophical distinction between ordinary experience and alleged aesthetic experience can be made. As well as rejecting the aesthetic, Dickie opposes the neo-Wittgensteinian identification of art by the 'family-resemblance' method, on the grounds that it forces us to count anything as art since everything resembles something else in some respect. In 1969 Dickie proposed an ‘institutional theory of art’, which he later elaborated in Art and the Aesthetic (1974). He attempted to define art in terms of the idea that a work of art in the descriptive sense is an artefact upon which some society or some subgroup of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation. But this definition was criticized as ‘circular’ and as formally lacking a ‘dimension without which it is not acute enough to discriminate art from other things'. In order to meet these objections Dickie subsequently modified his view. No longer talking of institutions, he now maintains the idea of an ‘art circle’, that is to say, of an ‘artworld system understood as a ‘framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public. The principal achievement of Dickie’s theory lies in its having compelled a general recognition of the importance of social context for identifying art.